Where do I begin? The pretext of the competition is to vanish while staying active online? Who would ever want to do that??? I want to completely disconnect from society except I want to stay connected to everyone?? Then on top of that, they give out a $5K prize...if you're working on this for a month, that hardly motivates anyone to drop their day job. So to make it actually possible, the guy has to join the freaking facebook group of the only group of people tracking him?? The thing is so contrived it's just worthless.
This seems to be what everyone missed in this post. The article is just some marketroidish stuff. By saying that they detect hidden patterns, they're just saying they look for random data. All this product is an entropy scanner. Scan the disk, find areas with high entropy, mark it as random.
Did anyone read the article? He's not saying that the character in the movie is going to blow people up in the name of free software (which sounds a lot like RMS to me)...it was an *analogy* He's comparing the character to his father and saying they're like a Linux guy and a Windows guy.
What about Tycho's elk? (scroll down to the appropriately named paragraph)
Tycho was known for his star measurements, and the elk died falling down the stairs after it drank too much beer (apparently the ancient equivalent of Hosehead from Strange Brew:-).
"The upgrade would adjust the machine's energy-saving settings for maximum efficiency. Of course, this upgrade would have to allow critical systems to opt out. Nobody wants air traffic control computers to suddenly go into deep hibernation. But correcting for critical systems should be very simple for a company that churns out millions of lines of code every year."
Wow, this paragraph made me soil my jeans. What's scarier: a) critical systems running Windows, b) critical systems running Windows connected to the Internet, c) critical systems running Windows connected to the Internet accepting patches from Microsoft, or d) trusting Microsoft to let anyone opt out of anything.
"Correcting for critical systems should be very simple for a company that churns out millions of lines of code every year." HA! What are you smoking? Microsoft has no way to know which systems are critical. And Microsoft doesn't have a wonderful track record with patches.
It's very frightening to think that c) above could actually exist, but unfortunately it's probably true.
HELLO!!! It says it will go down in history books as one of the most dramatic periods of SOLAR ACTIVITY in recent time. This site has gown straight down the toilet if stupid crap like this gets modded up.
Back in the bad old days (prior to Jan. 1, 1984), you could only get a phone from AT&T. They owned Western Electric, which was the only manufacturer of telephone equipment. They owned the lines (there were some exceptions where GTE had a local market). If you wanted a phone, you had to accept the whole package.
Yeah, and the nice thing was, they were good phones. They're built solid. I've still got a Western Electric 500 series sitting on my desk. Works like a charm. Nowadays you pay $50 every two years to buy a new phone because they're cheap and they break.
You had to lease your phones from them -- you couldn't buy them. You had to pay extra for DTMF (Touch-Tone [TM]). Your monthly bill was based on the base rate times the number of phones plus the base local call charge plus the incredibly overpriced long distance calls, which themselves worked on a minimum of three minutes and charges were rounded up to the next whole minute.
No, you paid per phone, but they didn't multiply that into your bill. Long distance wasn't incredibly overpriced. The rates had consistently gone down. You failed to mention that long distance calls used to be based on how far you were calling, simply because you tied up more circuits the farther you called. AT&T's rates were always based on what it cost them to complete the call, they weren't incredibly overpriced. Prices have gone down since because of bandwidth increases, allowing them to put more calls through.
They stifled technology much more so than IBM, even when it hurt them. It became cheaper and easier for them to have customers using DTMF, but because people wanted it rather than the damned dialing wheels, they kept on charging premiums, which meant they had to keep those old number nine crossbars in the COs rather than (or in addition to) the electronic switches.
The claim that AT&T stifled technology is absolutely ridiculous. Have you heard of Bell Laboratories?? Bell Labs was responsible for the invention of the transistor, for digital signalling rather than analog, for pioneering optical signalling. Just about any advance in communications this century was made at Bell Labs. People seem to think that Ma Bell stifled technology, but this was mainly because Uncle Sam forced them too. Since AT&T was the telecom monopoly, the government wouldn't allow them to start other services. Cell phones for instance, were invented decades ago at AT&T, but haven't gotten popular until now, because the government prohibited AT&T from getting into them. Your argument seems to be based on "AT&T stifled technology since they charged for touch tone service" which isn't very strong. Since you obviously used to phreak, that obviously sets up AT&T as your enemy, and your bias is obvious.
AT&T also had a great service record. Sure you had to pay extra for two phones, but if something went wrong, the lineman was out to fix it ASAP. Now with the Baby Bells you have a local monopoly with bad service, rather than one big monopoly with good service. You mentioned in later posts the Bell System Memorial but you seem to have learned little from that site. Ma Bell was a mostly benevolent monopoly, full of technical advances, but stifled by the government because of the position it was in. Good equipment and good service, that's unheard of these days.
I haven't read the bill, and I'm not a lawyer, but from the description, it sounds like NAT and VPN would be ok. It says you cannot conceal the transmission of the "communication" to the "communication service provider", nor can you receive a "communication" without the permission of the "communication service provider."
Now that sounds to me like if I pay for broadband, I'm paying for IP communication. My provider is selling me IP communication. So if I'm somehow tapping into Verizon's network, somehow stealing an IP connection, that's banned. But anything above the IP layer (VPN, tunneling, whatever) is ok. I guess NAT might be disallowed under this.
Is there any sysadmin out there who really wants this thick of an umbilical cord between them and their servers? I thought sysadmins having to carry pagers was bad, but this is just plain ridiculous. I can think of these three scenarios:
1) "Oh geez, spongebob1's not responding"...continues to stare at screen waiting for spongebob1's return...doesn't pay attention to sharp curve in the road...WHAM!!! Game over.
2) After going out to a fancy dinner with a nice attractive young lady, you're driving to the movie theater when your big honkin' LCD starts beeping. "Oh crap honey, I've gotta go to work and get this server running. I guess we can't go to the movie." "Ok, drop me off at home then." "Are you free on Thursday? Want to grab dinner again?" "No, I don't mind computer geeks, but this is ridiculous. It's either me or the servers, Billy."
I will never take a job that requires me to wear a pager or carry a cell phone so that people can reach me on off hours. And I'm certainly never going to mount an LCD in my car.
I find it funny that a lot of people on this site hate the current situation with the Baby Bells, but also aren't very big fans of AT&T. I think we've forgotten a few things.
(Note: I may not be old enough to remember this, but I'm a small Bell telephone equipment collector, and have done a pretty good deal of research on this.:-)
1) AT&T had a great service record before they were broken up. Granted, AT&T didn't have to deal with everybody's DSL lines and such. But in the day of the Bell System, there weren't nearly as many problems, and your linemen would come fix them quickly. AT&T was known for its outstanding service record. Sure you had to lease your phone from the phone company, but they were high quality phones. Old Bell System phones still work, your new cordless phone will last you two years if you're lucky.
2) It's a common misconception that rates have gone down since the breakup. Take a look at the FCC reports. What's really happened with long distance calls is they've standardized so that the rates don't depend on the distance of the call. For longer distance calls, rates had been going down steadily up until the breakup talks.
3. Consumers didn't bring complaints against AT&T, it was MCI and Sprint that did most of the complaining to the government. They were really responsible for the breakup talks. The government had brought complaints against AT&T before, but AT&T had always agreed to new regulation or a change in policies to meet the government's demands. Along come MCI and Sprint in the early 70s and they want to play ball. They not only want to play ball, they want the government to make AT&T give up their bats, balls, and ballfields. Consumers were fine with their telephone service. AT&T often gets accused of stifling innovation. On the contrary, they were regularly innovating since the beginning, and the government was often preventing them from trying new things (like cell phones for instance, which AT&T developed 30 years ago).
Now that they broke up AT&T, service went all to heck. Rates went down and back up. Obviously we can't put Ma Bell back together, but let's at least remember that the phone company wasn't always bad.
Not sure why this got modded troll. It's just a joke. On a historical note, the UnixPC was a real computer introduced by AT&T in 1985 (it was based around a 68010 and ran a customized version of Unix with a windowing environment they wrote for it). It has all the functionality I describe in the article.
Yes, it's true. I like obsolete technology enough to change my whole computing world around. Here's the bottom line: the UnixPC gives me more choices and flexibility, and better compatibility with the rest of the technology world.
More Hardware Options, for Less Benjamins (or free)
I am a computer engineer. I demand the best in desktop computers. There are many features for the UnixPC platform. My UnixPC came with 1 Megabyte of RAM, a 12" screen, a 20 Megabyte hard drive, a 360 Kilobyte disk drive, a 1200 baud modem for lightning fast connections over a phone line, and a Voice Power board, which allows me to record sounds on the computer. Entirely free. And the UnixPC runs UnixPC OS 3.51, based on AT&T's System V Release 4.
More Software Flexibility
Microsoft Word pales in comparison to vi. There's no equivalent to the versatility of typing with vi and formatting with troff. It does ASCII text formatting for maximum standards compliance. My AT&T dot-matrix printer prints all my code listings with stunning clarity.
The additional "Ethernet" board allows the UnixPC to connect to other computers on your network, or even to the "Internet," a new and growing global network of computers. Telnet does more for me than Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 ever did, allowing me to directly connect and enter commands into remote computers.
How Now Brown Cow?
Now that I've given you the reasons why I converted, here's the 411 on the how, dig it.
Step 1: Operating System Install The first time I turned on my UnixPC, the UnixPC prompted me to insert the install media. I sat for only an hour, putting floppy after floppy into the computer, while the system copied them to disk. It's like that time I owned a Pinto, and I kept feeding it more and more parts and spending more and more money until it eventually worked.
Step 2: Setting up Accounts After I installed the operating system and rebooted, my UnixPC asked me to login. I logged in with the installation account, and I was brought into the UnixPC's "Windowing" environment. I easily created myself an account and set the root password.
Step 3: Setting up "E-Mail" Once I installed the Voice Power board and its driver software, I also installed the Voice E-mail package. E-mail (or Electronic Mail) is a way for people to send each other messages over the Internet. The Voice E-mail package allows you to use your UnixPC as an answering machine, once the answering machine software is installed. When a message is recorded, an envelope icon shows up at the top right of the screen. Clicking on this icon brings you to your Inbox, where the new message will appear as a new E-mail. In the Inbox, you can also compose and send messages to other users, all you need to know is their UUCP bang path.
The AT&T UnixPC has all the features a 17 year old computer should have.
AT&T's UnixPC: The Computer With The Future Built In.
Yes, it's true. I like obsolete technology enough to change my whole computing world around. Here's the bottom line: the UnixPC gives me more choices and flexibility, and better compatibility with the rest of the technology world.
More Hardware Options, for Less Benjamins (or free)
I am a computer engineer. I demand the best in desktop computers. There are many features for the UnixPC platform. My UnixPC came with 1 Megabyte of RAM, a 12" screen, a 20 Megabyte hard drive, a 360 Kilobyte disk drive, a 1200 baud modem for lightning fast connections over a phone line, and a Voice Power board, which allows me to record sounds on the computer. Entirely free. And the UnixPC runs UnixPC OS 3.51, based on AT&T's System V Release 4.
More Software Flexibility
Microsoft Word pales in comparison to vi. There's no equivalent to the versatility of typing with vi and formatting with troff. It does ASCII text formatting for maximum standards compliance. My AT&T dot-matrix printer prints all my code listings with stunning clarity.
The additional "Ethernet" board allows the UnixPC to connect to other computers on your network, or even to the "Internet," a new and growing global network of computers. Telnet does more for me than Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 ever did, allowing me to directly connect and enter commands into remote computers.
How Now Brown Cow?
Now that I've given you the reasons why I converted, here's the 411 on the how, dig it.
Step 1: Operating System Install The first time I turned on my UnixPC, the UnixPC prompted me to insert the install media. I sat for only an hour, putting floppy after floppy into the computer, while the system copied them to disk. It's like that time I owned a Pinto, and I kept feeding it more and more parts and spending more and more money until it eventually worked.
Step 2: Setting up Accounts After I installed the operating system and rebooted, my UnixPC asked me to login. I logged in with the installation account, and I was brought into the UnixPC's "Windowing" environment. I easily created myself an account and set the root password.
Step 3: Setting up "E-Mail" Once I installed the Voice Power board and its driver software, I also installed the Voice E-mail package. E-mail (or Electronic Mail) is a way for people to send each other messages over the Internet. The Voice E-mail package allows you to use your UnixPC as an answering machine, once the answering machine software is installed. When a message is recorded, an envelope icon shows up at the top right of the screen. Clicking on this icon brings you to your Inbox, where the new message will appear as a new E-mail. In the Inbox, you can also compose and send messages to other users, all you need to know is their UUCP bang path.
The AT&T UnixPC has all the features a 17 year old computer should have.
AT&T's UnixPC: The Computer With The Future Built In.
It seems like a lot of people here think that NIST is using taxpayer money to give out money to corporations. Having worked there for a year and a half now, I understand why they are justified in using taxpayer dollars.
NIST does the research, and most of the time ends up selling the technology to corporations. This money they're awarding is mostly to start the research, with the idea that the money will be made back once the research can be put into a product. That way the country benefits by having better tech, and NIST doesn't completely drain taxpayer's wallets.
Yup, VeggieTales rock. VeggieTales quotes probably aren't seen on Slashdot because there's a low percentage of Christians here (not to mention that to have seen VeggieTales, you have to either be a Christian and somewhat young, or a Christian with young kids), and usually showing signs that you're one gets you modded down. Unless you're Larry Wall. He rocks too.:-)
"Look guys! I made this helicopter entirely out of bamboo and coconuts!"
(I don't understand why Gilligan's Island went so long, I mean the Professor came up with these brilliant inventions every episode. Why couldn't they just make a raft and have the Prof build a small nuclear reactor to power it?)
Not really. I got to watch the presentation that Grace gave on herself as well as a presentation by the team afterwards. I haven't read the article, but I don't imagine they got it all right.
What Grace really does is this (which is really cool, and she's still autonomous): Grace is capable of recognizing hand gestures, and programmed to ask for help if she gets lost. So rather than preprogrammed voice cues or hand signals, when Grace gets lost she will ask the nearest person "How do I get to conference room 23?" (or where ever she's supposed to be going) If the directions are clear, "Grace, you go straight down this hall, at the end of the hall you turn left, and conference room 23 is the third door on the right." Grace will follow them. She will also watch for hand gestures while you're giving directions. If something doesn't line up, like if you point right and you say to go left, she will ask you which you mean.
So Grace *is* autonomous, and put on quite an amazing performance!
You are sorely mistaken if you think that FIRST isn't about money. FIRST does very little to teach kids, the real goal of FIRST is to have a big engineering firm build a robot for a high school and have the high schoolers watch with amazement, think "gee, this is cool" and become engineers in high school. If FIRST was really about learning it wouldn't cost so much to enter, and there would be more restrictions about the amount of work that adults were allowed to put in on the robot.
In FIRST, there are teams who's robots are completely built by students, and there are teams who's robots are completely built by engineers from big companies, and guess who always wins. (they even win the community awards, since the team usually has more time to do work in their community because their sponsoring company is building their robot).
Maan...I was going to observe the boycott this week too, but now this stupid post by Chris is going to force me to talk.
Why is everybody like "AT&T killed the lab!" oh no! Look, AT&T bought the lab, and when they didn't have enough money to keep it running, they closed it. It's produced some wonderful stuff, but this is the way capitalism works. And Chris, *come* *on*. "uhh, I'm surprised AT&T hasn't bought out PARC and closed it down..." What kind of a comment is that? AT&T has had a good history of funding R&D, and now they're in some financial trouble. Cut them a break.
And the post towards the bottom of the page that says AT&T is tanking and the Internet age is getting rid of the Telco, that's ridiculous. AT&T is a big Internet player. Yeah they're a long distance company, but they also provide a lot of Internet connectivity. AT&T is in some financial trouble, but they're by no means out of it. They've taken some hits from the dot com crash and the 9/11 slump, but they'll be back.
This whole idea on Slashdot that AT&T was a big bad evil company and still is, is hilarious. They brought you Unix for crying out loud!
Some people may remember one of AT&T's entries into the PC market, way back in 1985, the AT&T UnixPC. Now you could run System V Unix on your home PC, not just on your VAX at work. It even had a windowing interface. (Side note: AT&T also operated something called The STORE, not much of a store really, more like a server you could dial into and download programs for the UnixPC, often with source)
Anyway, AT&T ended up selling 8.5 of these things and they're somewhat of a collector's item nowadays. Microsoft however, did release Microsoft Word for the UnixPC, yup, that's right, Microsoft Word for System V Unix.
Yeah, so that was 1985. It shouldn't be too hard to port it now. Word couldn't have changed *that* much, right? I mean it's not like Microsoft's products have gotten bloated...*tries to keep a straight face*
They may end up using IPv6, but simply because nobody is using it, which would make crossovers (connecting one computer to both GOVNET and the Internet) a bit more difficult.
Slashdot Mirror
To bring us this information?
Where do I begin? The pretext of the competition is to vanish while staying active online? Who would ever want to do that??? I want to completely disconnect from society except I want to stay connected to everyone?? Then on top of that, they give out a $5K prize...if you're working on this for a month, that hardly motivates anyone to drop their day job. So to make it actually possible, the guy has to join the freaking facebook group of the only group of people tracking him?? The thing is so contrived it's just worthless.
Fish, Barrel, Boom.
This seems to be what everyone missed in this post. The article is just some marketroidish stuff. By saying that they detect hidden patterns, they're just saying they look for random data. All this product is an entropy scanner. Scan the disk, find areas with high entropy, mark it as random.
Did anyone read the article? He's not saying that the character in the movie is going to blow people up in the name of free software (which sounds a lot like RMS to me)...it was an *analogy* He's comparing the character to his father and saying they're like a Linux guy and a Windows guy.
Tycho was known for his star measurements, and the elk died falling down the stairs after it drank too much beer (apparently the ancient equivalent of Hosehead from Strange Brew :-).
"The upgrade would adjust the machine's energy-saving settings for maximum efficiency. Of course, this upgrade would have to allow critical systems to opt out. Nobody wants air traffic control computers to suddenly go into deep hibernation. But correcting for critical systems should be very simple for a company that churns out millions of lines of code every year."
Wow, this paragraph made me soil my jeans. What's scarier: a) critical systems running Windows, b) critical systems running Windows connected to the Internet, c) critical systems running Windows connected to the Internet accepting patches from Microsoft, or d) trusting Microsoft to let anyone opt out of anything.
"Correcting for critical systems should be very simple for a company that churns out millions of lines of code every year." HA! What are you smoking? Microsoft has no way to know which systems are critical. And Microsoft doesn't have a wonderful track record with patches.
It's very frightening to think that c) above could actually exist, but unfortunately it's probably true.
HELLO!!! It says it will go down in history books as one of the most dramatic periods of SOLAR ACTIVITY in recent time. This site has gown straight down the toilet if stupid crap like this gets modded up.
Yeah, and the nice thing was, they were good phones. They're built solid. I've still got a Western Electric 500 series sitting on my desk. Works like a charm. Nowadays you pay $50 every two years to buy a new phone because they're cheap and they break.
You had to lease your phones from them -- you couldn't buy them. You had to pay extra for DTMF (Touch-Tone [TM]). Your monthly bill was based on the base rate times the number of phones plus the base local call charge plus the incredibly overpriced long distance calls, which themselves worked on a minimum of three minutes and charges were rounded up to the next whole minute.
No, you paid per phone, but they didn't multiply that into your bill. Long distance wasn't incredibly overpriced. The rates had consistently gone down. You failed to mention that long distance calls used to be based on how far you were calling, simply because you tied up more circuits the farther you called. AT&T's rates were always based on what it cost them to complete the call, they weren't incredibly overpriced. Prices have gone down since because of bandwidth increases, allowing them to put more calls through.
They stifled technology much more so than IBM, even when it hurt them. It became cheaper and easier for them to have customers using DTMF, but because people wanted it rather than the damned dialing wheels, they kept on charging premiums, which meant they had to keep those old number nine crossbars in the COs rather than (or in addition to) the electronic switches.
The claim that AT&T stifled technology is absolutely ridiculous. Have you heard of Bell Laboratories?? Bell Labs was responsible for the invention of the transistor, for digital signalling rather than analog, for pioneering optical signalling. Just about any advance in communications this century was made at Bell Labs. People seem to think that Ma Bell stifled technology, but this was mainly because Uncle Sam forced them too. Since AT&T was the telecom monopoly, the government wouldn't allow them to start other services. Cell phones for instance, were invented decades ago at AT&T, but haven't gotten popular until now, because the government prohibited AT&T from getting into them. Your argument seems to be based on "AT&T stifled technology since they charged for touch tone service" which isn't very strong. Since you obviously used to phreak, that obviously sets up AT&T as your enemy, and your bias is obvious.
AT&T also had a great service record. Sure you had to pay extra for two phones, but if something went wrong, the lineman was out to fix it ASAP. Now with the Baby Bells you have a local monopoly with bad service, rather than one big monopoly with good service. You mentioned in later posts the Bell System Memorial but you seem to have learned little from that site. Ma Bell was a mostly benevolent monopoly, full of technical advances, but stifled by the government because of the position it was in. Good equipment and good service, that's unheard of these days.
Now that sounds to me like if I pay for broadband, I'm paying for IP communication. My provider is selling me IP communication. So if I'm somehow tapping into Verizon's network, somehow stealing an IP connection, that's banned. But anything above the IP layer (VPN, tunneling, whatever) is ok. I guess NAT might be disallowed under this.
1) "Oh geez, spongebob1's not responding"...continues to stare at screen waiting for spongebob1's return...doesn't pay attention to sharp curve in the road...WHAM!!! Game over.
2) After going out to a fancy dinner with a nice attractive young lady, you're driving to the movie theater when your big honkin' LCD starts beeping. "Oh crap honey, I've gotta go to work and get this server running. I guess we can't go to the movie." "Ok, drop me off at home then." "Are you free on Thursday? Want to grab dinner again?" "No, I don't mind computer geeks, but this is ridiculous. It's either me or the servers, Billy."
I will never take a job that requires me to wear a pager or carry a cell phone so that people can reach me on off hours. And I'm certainly never going to mount an LCD in my car.
(Note: I may not be old enough to remember this, but I'm a small Bell telephone equipment collector, and have done a pretty good deal of research on this.
1) AT&T had a great service record before they were broken up. Granted, AT&T didn't have to deal with everybody's DSL lines and such. But in the day of the Bell System, there weren't nearly as many problems, and your linemen would come fix them quickly. AT&T was known for its outstanding service record. Sure you had to lease your phone from the phone company, but they were high quality phones. Old Bell System phones still work, your new cordless phone will last you two years if you're lucky.
2) It's a common misconception that rates have gone down since the breakup. Take a look at the FCC reports. What's really happened with long distance calls is they've standardized so that the rates don't depend on the distance of the call. For longer distance calls, rates had been going down steadily up until the breakup talks.
3. Consumers didn't bring complaints against AT&T, it was MCI and Sprint that did most of the complaining to the government. They were really responsible for the breakup talks. The government had brought complaints against AT&T before, but AT&T had always agreed to new regulation or a change in policies to meet the government's demands. Along come MCI and Sprint in the early 70s and they want to play ball. They not only want to play ball, they want the government to make AT&T give up their bats, balls, and ballfields. Consumers were fine with their telephone service. AT&T often gets accused of stifling innovation. On the contrary, they were regularly innovating since the beginning, and the government was often preventing them from trying new things (like cell phones for instance, which AT&T developed 30 years ago).
Now that they broke up AT&T, service went all to heck. Rates went down and back up. Obviously we can't put Ma Bell back together, but let's at least remember that the phone company wasn't always bad.
First toast? :-)
Not sure why this got modded troll. It's just a joke. On a historical note, the UnixPC was a real computer introduced by AT&T in 1985 (it was based around a 68010 and ran a customized version of Unix with a windowing environment they wrote for it). It has all the functionality I describe in the article.
October 14, 2002
Yes, it's true. I like obsolete technology enough to change my whole computing world around. Here's the bottom line: the UnixPC gives me more choices and flexibility, and better compatibility with the rest of the technology world.
More Hardware Options, for Less Benjamins (or free)
I am a computer engineer. I demand the best in desktop computers. There are many features for the UnixPC platform. My UnixPC came with 1 Megabyte of RAM, a 12" screen, a 20 Megabyte hard drive, a 360 Kilobyte disk drive, a 1200 baud modem for lightning fast connections over a phone line, and a Voice Power board, which allows me to record sounds on the computer. Entirely free. And the UnixPC runs UnixPC OS 3.51, based on AT&T's System V Release 4.
More Software Flexibility
Microsoft Word pales in comparison to vi. There's no equivalent to the versatility of typing with vi and formatting with troff. It does ASCII text formatting for maximum standards compliance. My AT&T dot-matrix printer prints all my code listings with stunning clarity.
The additional "Ethernet" board allows the UnixPC to connect to other computers on your network, or even to the "Internet," a new and growing global network of computers. Telnet does more for me than Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 ever did, allowing me to directly connect and enter commands into remote computers.
How Now Brown Cow?
Now that I've given you the reasons why I converted, here's the 411 on the how, dig it.
Step 1: Operating System Install
The first time I turned on my UnixPC, the UnixPC prompted me to insert the install media. I sat for only an hour, putting floppy after floppy into the computer, while the system copied them to disk. It's like that time I owned a Pinto, and I kept feeding it more and more parts and spending more and more money until it eventually worked.
Step 2: Setting up Accounts
After I installed the operating system and rebooted, my UnixPC asked me to login. I logged in with the installation account, and I was brought into the UnixPC's "Windowing" environment. I easily created myself an account and set the root password.
Step 3: Setting up "E-Mail"
Once I installed the Voice Power board and its driver software, I also installed the Voice E-mail package. E-mail (or Electronic Mail) is a way for people to send each other messages over the Internet. The Voice E-mail package allows you to use your UnixPC as an answering machine, once the answering machine software is installed. When a message is recorded, an envelope icon shows up at the top right of the screen. Clicking on this icon brings you to your Inbox, where the new message will appear as a new E-mail. In the Inbox, you can also compose and send messages to other users, all you need to know is their UUCP bang path.
The AT&T UnixPC has all the features a 17 year old computer should have.
AT&T's UnixPC: The Computer With The Future Built In.
October 14, 2002
Yes, it's true. I like obsolete technology enough to change my whole computing world around. Here's the bottom line: the UnixPC gives me more choices and flexibility, and better compatibility with the rest of the technology world.
More Hardware Options, for Less Benjamins (or free)
I am a computer engineer. I demand the best in desktop computers. There are many features for the UnixPC platform. My UnixPC came with 1 Megabyte of RAM, a 12" screen, a 20 Megabyte hard drive, a 360 Kilobyte disk drive, a 1200 baud modem for lightning fast connections over a phone line, and a Voice Power board, which allows me to record sounds on the computer. Entirely free. And the UnixPC runs UnixPC OS 3.51, based on AT&T's System V Release 4.
More Software Flexibility
Microsoft Word pales in comparison to vi. There's no equivalent to the versatility of typing with vi and formatting with troff. It does ASCII text formatting for maximum standards compliance. My AT&T dot-matrix printer prints all my code listings with stunning clarity.
The additional "Ethernet" board allows the UnixPC to connect to other computers on your network, or even to the "Internet," a new and growing global network of computers. Telnet does more for me than Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 ever did, allowing me to directly connect and enter commands into remote computers.
How Now Brown Cow?
Now that I've given you the reasons why I converted, here's the 411 on the how, dig it.
Step 1: Operating System Install
The first time I turned on my UnixPC, the UnixPC prompted me to insert the install media. I sat for only an hour, putting floppy after floppy into the computer, while the system copied them to disk. It's like that time I owned a Pinto, and I kept feeding it more and more parts and spending more and more money until it eventually worked.
Step 2: Setting up Accounts
After I installed the operating system and rebooted, my UnixPC asked me to login. I logged in with the installation account, and I was brought into the UnixPC's "Windowing" environment. I easily created myself an account and set the root password.
Step 3: Setting up "E-Mail"
Once I installed the Voice Power board and its driver software, I also installed the Voice E-mail package. E-mail (or Electronic Mail) is a way for people to send each other messages over the Internet. The Voice E-mail package allows you to use your UnixPC as an answering machine, once the answering machine software is installed. When a message is recorded, an envelope icon shows up at the top right of the screen. Clicking on this icon brings you to your Inbox, where the new message will appear as a new E-mail. In the Inbox, you can also compose and send messages to other users, all you need to know is their UUCP bang path.
The AT&T UnixPC has all the features a 17 year old computer should have.
AT&T's UnixPC: The Computer With The Future Built In.
NIST does the research, and most of the time ends up selling the technology to corporations. This money they're awarding is mostly to start the research, with the idea that the money will be made back once the research can be put into a product. That way the country benefits by having better tech, and NIST doesn't completely drain taxpayer's wallets.
Yup, VeggieTales rock. VeggieTales quotes probably aren't seen on Slashdot because there's a low percentage of Christians here (not to mention that to have seen VeggieTales, you have to either be a Christian and somewhat young, or a Christian with young kids), and usually showing signs that you're one gets you modded down. Unless you're Larry Wall. He rocks too. :-)
"Look guys! I made this helicopter entirely out of bamboo and coconuts!"
(I don't understand why Gilligan's Island went so long, I mean the Professor came up with these brilliant inventions every episode. Why couldn't they just make a raft and have the Prof build a small nuclear reactor to power it?)
What Grace really does is this (which is really cool, and she's still autonomous): Grace is capable of recognizing hand gestures, and programmed to ask for help if she gets lost. So rather than preprogrammed voice cues or hand signals, when Grace gets lost she will ask the nearest person "How do I get to conference room 23?" (or where ever she's supposed to be going) If the directions are clear, "Grace, you go straight down this hall, at the end of the hall you turn left, and conference room 23 is the third door on the right." Grace will follow them. She will also watch for hand gestures while you're giving directions. If something doesn't line up, like if you point right and you say to go left, she will ask you which you mean.
So Grace *is* autonomous, and put on quite an amazing performance!
In FIRST, there are teams who's robots are completely built by students, and there are teams who's robots are completely built by engineers from big companies, and guess who always wins. (they even win the community awards, since the team usually has more time to do work in their community because their sponsoring company is building their robot).
Why is everybody like "AT&T killed the lab!" oh no! Look, AT&T bought the lab, and when they didn't have enough money to keep it running, they closed it. It's produced some wonderful stuff, but this is the way capitalism works. And Chris, *come* *on*. "uhh, I'm surprised AT&T hasn't bought out PARC and closed it down..." What kind of a comment is that? AT&T has had a good history of funding R&D, and now they're in some financial trouble. Cut them a break.
And the post towards the bottom of the page that says AT&T is tanking and the Internet age is getting rid of the Telco, that's ridiculous. AT&T is a big Internet player. Yeah they're a long distance company, but they also provide a lot of Internet connectivity. AT&T is in some financial trouble, but they're by no means out of it. They've taken some hits from the dot com crash and the 9/11 slump, but they'll be back.
This whole idea on Slashdot that AT&T was a big bad evil company and still is, is hilarious. They brought you Unix for crying out loud!
Anyway, AT&T ended up selling 8.5 of these things and they're somewhat of a collector's item nowadays. Microsoft however, did release Microsoft Word for the UnixPC, yup, that's right, Microsoft Word for System V Unix.
Yeah, so that was 1985. It shouldn't be too hard to port it now. Word couldn't have changed *that* much, right? I mean it's not like Microsoft's products have gotten bloated...*tries to keep a straight face*
It actually has a chance of working. JHU/APL also did the work on NEAR the satellite that crashed landed on Eros and still worked afterwards.
They may end up using IPv6, but simply because nobody is using it, which would make crossovers (connecting one computer to both GOVNET and the Internet) a bit more difficult.
NeCoRo is 1 month old.
He weighs 1.6 kilograms.
He is 32 centimeters tall.
He has grey hair.
His hairballs are real.
But he is not.